English version of PTT about pttbbs

[chhsiao1981]

hi @billsimon,

Unsure whether your question is about the system-setup or about the content of ptt.

For system-setup:
ptt is a kind of BBS-system and is an open-source project.
I (And all the system-admins) can try to provide the English version of the document to help you setup your own ptt-like BBS.

For content:
I am sorry that it's a very hard problem (involving natural-language processing) and I don't think ptt can provide such service in the near future.

[billsimon]

I am not in a hurry and you are of course not obligated to answer my request; I am grateful that you are willing to consider it. Thank you.

[billsimon]

Hello @chhsiao1981! Thanks for your quick response.

I mean to do translation of documentation so that English speakers can set up a PTT-like BBS.

Also to translate the strings within the BBS software so that it can be deployed in an English-speaking region. I do not mean live automatic translation of content.

It looks like the software works with UTF8 terminals which would be suitable for all character sets.

[chhsiao1981]

hi @billsimon,

I am sorry that It's with high probability that I myself am unable to do the translation before 11/20.
Hopefully you can wait until some time after 11/20.

Due to the original purpose of ptt (developed 15 years ago), currently there are some caveats:

1. mainly used in telnet / ssh protocol, currently web-interface is used only for reading articles, no other interactions.

2. efficiency comes with highly optimized local shm / local file-distribution in 1 machine.
   (Such kind of service is write-less-read-a-lot service, ptt use RAID as large local-file-storage.)
   unable to do horizontally scaling for now.

3. Originally designed for big-5. UTF-8 loses the "two-color-in-1-char" effect in terminal.
   (But I don't think the change impact a lot, considering that many people also read the articles from browsers nowadays.)

4. Timezone is fixed in GMT+8, but you can definitely modify the code or pr the code.

   https://github.com/ptt/pttbbs/blob/master/common/diet/time.c

5. (Some other caveats that I don't know for now～)

[chhsiao1981]

The English version of the installation-guide is described in the wiki. I think we can close the issue～